


Lord of Shadows

by CuChulainnX19



Category: Destiny (Video Games), Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Destiny Lore, Disembodied Sith Lords, F/M, Paraphrasing the First Doctor, Revan the Shattered, Speaking to Small Human-Form Heads, The Black Garden (Destiny)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24799624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuChulainnX19/pseuds/CuChulainnX19
Summary: The Darkness seeks to devour all things, so that it alone will survive to decide the fate of the universe. Occasionally, small but stubborn little lights get in the way.Letters and reflections from a Destiny-flavored reimagining of the Great Galactic War.
Relationships: Male Revan/Bastila Shan
Kudos: 7





	1. Pandaemonium Lost

Hello, there.

No, no, don’t be afraid—I know, I know, the darkness lies heavy on this place, and on myself, though that’s only natural, you would understand if you saw me in my mortal form.

I was, after all, Darth Revan. A Jedi before and after, of course, but never a very good one, and not nearly enough to atone for my darker self’s crimes. 

What’s that? No, atonement is for the living. I am who I am and what I am and I know Bastila is waiting for me—that’s the nice thing about being rewritten like this. The usual boundaries don’t mean as much. I’ve been busy here, though, too busy to be with her, and we have much work together, you and I, before my time will at last be over.

Distrust me if you must, little light, I can hardly fault you. The disembodied spirits of former dark lords are rarely reliable, after all, but at least let me tell you a story.

You see, when Meetra and Scourge and I descended on the Emperor’s flagship—the last of its kind, I’d wager, twelve thousand years old even then, yet made only more terrible by its age—we entered a realm of which only one of us knew anything worth knowing. Scourge knew that we were bound to lose.

So, when he turned on us, as I knew by then he would, it was not a true betrayal. Meetra saw it, too, as the lightsaber seared her ribcage and turned her heart to vapor. She was not a victim of betrayal, but a sacrifice—a sacrifice to the cruel logic of Vitiate’s immortal throne, in order that the sword which cut her down be something other than the devouring arm of the Emperor.

I was not so fortunate, nor did I hope to be. In the bowels of darkness more pitch-black than a singularity’s shadow I cast my line and found the Emperor’s Voice, and from her I learned in its totality the final rule. 

No, don’t ask that, not yet. The name of the rule is not important. All that matters is this: life and death, light and dark, and the one rule that divides them. Vitiate is not that rule, but he knows it, and he is not to be outmatched by strength alone.

Unfortunate, then, that he has devoured a thousand years in which to practice cunning.


	2. Lost Light

_ —I am dead. _

Scourge is spectacularly undead. And Meetra, well, she’s quite dead, too, though she was so very bright at the end. So very bright, a brave little light in the Force.

But the Emperor was unmoved. He has gathered to himself the secrets of death, the char-black harvest of a thousand years, and wrapped them around himself as cloak and blood and sword.

I, too, have transgressed mortality. Dear old master Kreia made her introductions, and I was pleased once more to meet her. We had ourselves a little tête-a-Traya, a couple fallen Sith lords exchanging definitions.

I defined myself an ally. She defined for me the entelechy of death, and sang through the Force the cutting edge of that fearful autonomy. 

_ Revelation, my friends, it does go down hard. The definition killed me. The killing redefined me. _

_ This is the shape and point of the tooth: Nothing has ever lived that will not die. _

Now I fly through the abyss of stars, suspended half in shadow and a third in light, untouching and untouched by the vast devouring chasm that lives within Vitiate’s worldship. There are others like him, older and deadlier and more ineffable in their slumber. I soar amongst their shadow-realms, mapping the connections like some latter Daragon. 

I want to appear in the Temple and taunt them,  _ lo, lo, I never sleep, I dance in light and shadow, I never sleep, I will never die. I will never die. I want to ask them: if you followed your laws here, to this trembling fearful place, of what use were those laws? _

But too much remains for me to rest or dream. I shout into deep places. Alek! I call, Alek, Alek! Can you hear me?

Sometimes I think he answers. Sometimes I wonder what became of Scourge. He was… implacable. 

I miss Bastila. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A somewhat more derivative chapter, with the italicized lines and general structure taken from "Ghost Fragment: Hellmouth."
> 
> Poor Revan. And it's still better than what SWTOR gave him.


	3. Ruin Wings

In a garden on Tython there grows a tree of silver wings. 

There is nothing else like it in the galaxy. 

The Jedi do not go near this tree, nor does anything else, and this is how it is meant to be. 

Only one creature desires that tree, and that creature is Vitiate, for Vitiate desires everything, that he might consume it, that ‘everything,’ and grow fat with strength.

Vitiate is a coward dealing death in order to flee it, and the mightier he has grown the greater has grown his fear, and with his fear has grown his foolishness, for it takes courage to face fear.

Tython is a world as steeped in the light side of the Force as Korriban or Dromund Kaas is marinated in the darkness.

And every light has a source, and every light casts a shadow.

_ This is not the beginning but it is the reason _ . 

Light is a temporary phenomenon, and therefore the more precious, and if Vitiate understood why the Jedi do not go near that tree, if he understood that such a tree existed at all, he would burn his empire as fuel to carve a path through the Republic and turn a million worlds to ash in order to kill it.

This is because Vitiate, for all his age and power, is a fool, and his fear will allow him to be nothing else. 

There are simpler ways to kill a thing like Vitiate, and more painful ways for the galaxy to die, but the reason is this: the Jedi serve the light, but they do not exalt it, any more than the Sith respect it.

The Jedi are the heart and sword of a dream too precious for the Sith to comprehend, and those who succeed at that impossible balance begin to understand. 

There is a garden on Tython in which death grows as fruit, and grubs that do not mature wallow among the roots of red flowers that sprout and die in the same instant and bloom forever.


	4. Last Letter Home

Bastila—

I hope this finds you well. We said our goodbyes in person, and your love and the memory of little Vaner may be all that will sustain me in the coming years, but I wanted to leave this as a record of my life and the reasons I had to depart. If nothing else—I know your thoughts as you know mine—this may serve as a testament to the wider galaxy, a warning more substantial than rumors passed down through the ages. And I can no longer abide speechifying to anonymous crowds.

I should, perhaps, have returned to the Jedi as soon as Mandalore the Ultimate was dead. I had his final words to identify the threat the old masters on the Council had feared in the shadows, but I knew them for cowards and—and this is more important, I think—I had already wandered into the darkness myself. The horror I inflicted on Malachor V could not be easily forgiven, and I had no patience—no time, I called it—to face justice for my crimes. It may be I was right, or it may not; the past cannot be undone and now the galaxy stands where I have placed it, on the precipice of annihilation.

For, you see, I never met Vitiate, not in person. Our fleet would have been torn asunder long before then, dear Admiral Karath shot or beheaded or left to rot on Dromund Kaas—out of the way, at any rate. No, all we ever found was the Star Forge, but the things I found there!—

As I said, I had already wandered into the darkness. But it is possible, just possible, that I would have recovered on my own (unlikely, I find it hard to imagine a life of light now without your spark), but it was there, in the depths of that maze of steel almost alive with the dark side, that I  _ saw _ him, and it was there that he saw me. 

That, my love, is why I could not let you come with me on this journey. 

It is almost certain, though I have not quite said as much to Meetra, that none of us will return from this voyage, at least not alive. If it is possible, I would like to see you again, you and Vaner, but if all else fails I do not believe any power, however dark, could disperse my consciousness before we meet again in the unity of the Force. 

Keep this message safe, along with my other records: you know the ones. This is merely the first act, but the Republic and the Jedi must be ready, or all we have struggled for will be lost. In some way, in some form, I shall return, but until that day arrives let there be no tears shed between us, for we will have one another always. Be true to yourself, my love, and prove that we were not so wrong, in the end.

Love,

Revan


End file.
